Many of us find using an application to manage our blog postings much easier than using the web-based interface (as good as it is). It is great to be able to work on a post off-line and post it when it is convenient to connect to the Internet. While Internet connectivity may be ubiquitous, there are still some places where it isn't available (like on airplanes).
WLW has a great selection of 3rd party plug-ins to manage all sorts of things like pulling in pictures from Flikr, inserting Inked comments from your Tablet PC, source code formatting, and many others!
The instructions SHOULD work for most any 3rd party application (like BlogJet, Ecto, ) but I really like the free Windows Live Writer (WLW) application from Microsoft. Our blogging platform supports the MetaWebLog API so it should work with many tools if you wish to use a different tool or are on a platform other than Windows.
After you have downloaded and installed WLW, you'll want to define your Weblog to post to. From the Weblog Menu, Choose "Add Weblog Account" and on the "Choose Blog Type screen", select "Another Weblog service" and click "Next" button.
On the "Weblog Homepage and Login" screen, enter the URL to your blog (most likely something like http://blogs.pipetrader.com/blogname where blogname is the directory/folder for your blog), and your username and password (as provided to you when you signed up for your blog) and press the "Next" button.
If your Internet connection type is working properly, WLW should automatically determine the blog type and move on to the final screen. If for some reason it doesn't, double check the spelling of the URL. If after all that you are still presented with the "Select Provider" screen, here is the information you'll need for that. You will need to select "Custom (Metaweblog API)" from the pulldown list and enter http://blogs.pipetrader.com/blogname/services/metablogapi.aspx without the quotes where blogname is the directory for your blog) in the "Remote posting URL for this weblog:" field.
After WLW downloads information from the blog server you should be greeted with the "Weblog Configuration Complete" screen and be good to go.
If for some reason you are presented with a pop-up like this: 
, don't worry about it. Just go back into the Weblog menu and edit your blog settings and it should download the styles correctly.
One thing to remember, you will still need to use the administrative web interface to manage most of the settings on your weblog (including choosing your style). WLW and other such tools are primarily for managing the content for your blog.
Enjoy! if you have questions or thoughts about this post, please don't hesitate to use our comments system.